Category: General

The “truth” behind Whitney’s song price increases

Ever since the death of Whitney Houston, the twitter-sphere has been abuzz with stories about price hikes on her songs. For example, the iTunes Music Store now has a large number of her songs on the highest pricing tier. So does Amazon. This is being seen as an example of greed by Apple or by Sony (the latter for the people who realise that its the labels that set the price, not Apple).

However, it’s not as cynical as a label cashing in on the death of an almost forgotten music star who hasn’t sold very much for the last decade. (Seriously – when was the last time before a week ago that you bought or even listened to a Whitney Houston song?) I am willing to bet that nobody at Apple or Sony said “let’s raise the price for the Bodyguard song!”. Instead, what people are seeing is automatic price settings.

The pricing of songs at digital music stores – such as, but not exclusively, the iTunes Music Store – often include triggers. “When sales increase by X% or cross this threshold, increase the price to the next level”. These triggers are worked out by the labels – Apple dictate what price points are available, but which one gets used are up to the labels. (Amazon does a similar thing). When sales spikes, the price goes up.

Note that the algorithm doesn’t care about _why_ the price has gone up. Nobody at Sony decided to profit on Whitney Houston’s death explicitly. It just worked out that way.

And it’s not like the labels are completely insensitive either – as of last night, the most popular Whitney Houston song on iTunes (“I Will Always Love You”, aka “the Bodyguard Song”) is back at the mid-tier price point. And that would have been a decision by a human.

Not _everything_ is an example of corporate greed, you know.

My heart bleeds for Karen Gee…

School maths causes pain – Sydney Morning Herald

The woman featured in this story is complaining about high education costs, and wishes that the government could contribute more. My heart bleeds for her – at about 5.25 litres/minute. Seriously, hasn’t she got better things to whinge about?

Let’s actually put some numbers on this, and see what exactly she’s complaining about.

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Leveraged Buyouts – what a crock

When you borrow money to buy something, it’s not uncommon for the thing you bought to be used as collateral for the loan. The obvious example is a house mortgage – you borrow money, the house is the security. This makes the act of borrowing itself reasonably risk free: if the purchase falls through, the loan is dissolved and all you’re out is some administrative fees. Your real risk starts when the purchase is successful.

TL;DR – Borrowing money to buy a house is to leveraged buyouts as a pat on the cheek is to a punch to the testicles; same general act, very different implications.

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Goals for 2012

Each year, I make exactly one New Year’s resolution: only make one resolution. I’ve been doing that for five years, and I have a 100% success rate.

But I do make goals. The difference between a goal and a resolution is that with a resolution, as soon as you break it, it’s gone. But a goal is something you work towards, and you measure yourself not with the binary of achieved/failed, but by the progress and effort you make along the way.

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My Book Collection

Well, the technical ones, anyway – not shown are the two other similarly sized bookcases – and the other one which is a little more than twice as big – which are overflowing with my fiction collection.

(Click to embiggen)

The bottom two shelves (and a couple in the third row) are very dated – I don’t think anyone cares about the pre-OS7 Macintosh Toolbox anymore, for example. A number of the books in that row are from my university days.

The next three rows (including the slight spill over to the top row, which will soon force me to relocate the DVDs) are a more recent vintage – those are the books that I kept at work while I procrastinated about unpacking my study (Hey, I only moved in just under two years ago!). But I finally did that on the weekend, and now they’re home (except for a few I’ve lent out)

I gotta say, I’m thankful for ebooks – over the last two years, I’ve predominately bought ebooks. I’m not sure I could get their physical versions on the top shelf even without the DVDs (it would be another 24 books or so).

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this isn’t to brag or anything – it’s to set myself a challenge. I haven’t been keeping up with my reading over the last year for a number of reasons, up to and including battling with a moderate case of depression. I’m going to change that though – I’m going to go through those top shelves and re-read (or, in a few cases, read) each on that’s still relevant – which is most of them. I mean, I’m sure Webwork In Action was great in the day, but Webwork isn’t relevant to me anymore. Age isn’t a factor, though – in that bookcase somewhere is a 2nd-printing copy of The Mythical Man Month (which I picked up in a Lifeline store for $5!), and I’ve got both the original and the re-issue version of Peopleware in there. Then there’s the Psychology of Computer Programming – but that’s from the 20th anniversary printing.

Anyway, my challenge – to myself – will be to read and post a review of the books in there. One a week, with the first review due next Saturday (October 1), with an e-book thrown into the mix every so often as well. I’ll post a full set of the books within the next few days, and I’ll even see if I can turn it into a poll of sorts in case there’s books people want me to review first.

Watch this space for more.

Updated: You can see my Delicious Library collection, or you can view the page that will become a dynamic view over my books (but right now is just static)

Carbon Tax Thoughts – “That’s not a tax – it’s an ETS”

What a lot of people haven’t seemed to understand about the carbon tax is that it’s not a tax. It’s actually a way to transition from a “pollute-all-you-want” model to a capped-permit model – the ETS.

In order for an ETS to work, you need to have permits to pollute, issued by the government at a price. In order to developed a market for the permits (the ‘T’ stands for trading, after all), you need to have a finite number of these permits, so that companies can sell the permits that they don’t need. You also need penalties for the people who pollute without the permits.

The ‘carbon tax’ is an introduction of a uncapped permit scheme. With no upper limit on the number of permits, there’s no secondary market, but what this does do is help the government work out how many permits are required. Then, in 2015, the government is going to limit the number of permits it issues each year. Companies will still be able to buy them from the government – until the permits run out. After that, they can either buy them from the general market, OR pay the fine for polluting without a permit (this will set an upper-cap on the market price).

Labelling it a carbon tax is largely an exercise in both smear politics and lazy journalism (and it doesn’t help that the politicians have accepted the term ‘carbon tax’ as a moniker).

For a summary – in the government’s own words – see the Clean Energy Future site.

Two weeks with Twitter…

A little over two weeks ago, I succumbed and decided to see exactly what the deal with twitter was. It just didn’t seem like a wonderful tool – SMS for the web? Really? But, in the spirit of inquiry, I thought I’d give it ago. Now, a bit over two weeks later, I can say “I’m glad”.
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Warning: get off housing gravy train – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

There’s an opinion page on the ABC News page about the increasing rise in house prices (and the subsequent fall in housing affordability). The solution presented: build more housing (not necessarily houses – apartments are okay too), thus increasing the supply. Unfortunately, that won’t help.
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